Archive for the ‘research’ Category

Addressing ubicomp: Computing people, places and things

Saturday, March 13th, 2010

The following is an edited excerpt from my PhD thesis, which articulates the various ways we might understand what we mean by ‘ubiquitous computing’

‘The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it’ (Weiser, 1991).

‘The goal is to achieve the most effective kind of technology, that which is essentially invisible to the user… I call this future world “Ubiquitous Computing” (Ubicomp) ‘ (Weiser, 1993).

In the last 20 years the idea of ubiquitous computing has been reiterated, revised and extraordinarily expanded. Starting from the premise that computing might be un-tethered from the grey boxes that sit on desks and become ‘embedded in the woodwork’ of everyday life, ‘ubicomp’ has come to signify research agendas, an eponymous conference, technical goals, an ethos and a legacy. This thesis focuses upon the future orientation inherent to all of the threads that weave together to form ubicomp. From the outset the details of ubicomp have been positioned in the future. Weiser’s ‘Computer for the 21st Century’ popularised a research agenda in the guise of a vision that many subsequently adopted. Yet the article was doubly influential because, as Bell and Dourish observe, ‘it also set a rhetorical tone that many have adopted’. Therefore the same concern for near futures is present in contemporary ubicomp agendas, the papers presented in conferences, and the ways in which ‘advances’ in the field are measured.

There are a number of common threads to the various applications of ‘ubicomp’ as a descriptor for research activity. These themes all somewhat branch from the first and most obvious implication of calling it ‘ubiquitous’. It is worth situating the concept in its initial time-space, for when Weiser and his colleagues were experimentally developing the projects that came to make up the ubicomp project there were few affordable personal computers, no ‘World Wide Web’ and mobile telephones could barely fit into a handbag let alone a pocket. The initial experimental systems created as ‘ubi-comp’ at Xerox PARC under Weiser’s leadership were fixed at three scales of device, called ‘tabs’, ‘pads’ and ‘boards’. As Dourish observes, ubicomp proceeded on three tracks, which ‘were known as computation by the inch, the foot and the yard’ (Dourish, 2004), referring to the three types of device. Inch-scale ‘tabs’ were something akin to ‘computationally enhanced Post-It Notes’, foot-scale ‘pads’ were designed as what might now be recognised as ‘tablet PCs’, and yard-scale boards were epitomised by ‘LiveBoard’: ‘a large-scale display… supporting multiple pens, a sort of computationally enhanced whiteboard’. Of course these things were not supposed to exist in isolation, tabs, pads and boards were supposed to be prolific in number and scattered throughout the everyday environment:

‘In the everyday environment, information continually undergoes transformations and translations, and we should expect the same in a computationally enhanced version of that environment such as might be delivered to us by ubiquitous computing’ (Dourish, 2004).

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Ubiquitous Computing: Mark Weiser’s vision and legacy

Friday, March 12th, 2010

This is a sub-section of the first chapter of my PhD thesis, its my attempt to reflect on Mark Weiser’s legacy in the field of ubiquitous computing.

2009 marked the tenth anniversary of the death of Mark Weiser, a man that many believe earned the title ‘visionary’. As a Principal Scientist and subsequently Chief Technology Officer at Xerox PARC, Weiser has been identified as the ‘godfather’ of ubiquitous computing (ubicomp). In the years since his demise many of the ideas that Weiser championed have come to greater prominence. As Yvonne Rogers points out this influence has been felt across industry, government and commercial research, from the European Union’s ‘disappearing computer’ initiative to MIT’s ‘Oxygen’, HP’s ‘CoolTown’ and Philips ‘Vision of the Future’. All of these projects aspired to Weiser’s tenet of the everyday environment and the objects within being embedded with computational capacities such that they might bend to our (human) will. Within the research community, as Genevieve Bell and Paul Dourish remark ‘almost one quarter of all the papers published in the ‘Ubicomp’ conference between 2001 and 2005 cite Weiser’s foundational articles’.

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Reflecting on Mark Weiser’s legacy ten years on

Wednesday, August 5th, 2009

The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.

-Mark Weiser, 1991 “The Computer for the 21st Century” Scientific American

The goal is to achieve the most effective kind of technology, that which is essentially invisible to the user… I call this future world “Ubiquitous Computing” (Ubicomp).

-Mark Weiser, 1993 “Some Computer Science issues in Ubiquitous Computing” Communications of the ACM

2009 marks the tenth anniversary of the death of a man that many believe earned the title ‘visionary’, his name was Mark Weiser. As a Principal Scientist and subsequently Chief Technology Officer at Xerox PARC, Weiser is best known as the ‘godfather’ of ubiquitous computing. In the years since his demise many of the ideas that Weiser championed have come to greater prominence. As Yvonne Rogers points out this influence has been felt across industry, government and commercial research, from the EU’s ‘disappearing computer’ initiative to MIT’s ‘Oxygen’, HP’s ‘CoolTown’ and Phillips ‘Vision of the Future’. All of these projects aspired to Weiser’s tenet of the everyday environment and the objects within being embeded with computational capacities such that they might bend to our (human) will. Within the research community, as Bell and Dourish remark, ‘of the 108 papers comprising the Ubicomp conference proceedings between 2001 and 2004, fully 47% of the papers are oriented towards a proximate (and inevitable) technological future’ and ‘almost one quarter of all the papers published in the Ubicomp conference between 2001 and 2005 cite Weiser’s foundational articles’.

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Yesterday’s tomorrows

Friday, September 5th, 2008

F. Leger's Mechanical Elements - From the cover of the Penguin edition of Brave New World

Last week I attended the RGS-IBG annual international conference, for which I convened a session and presented a paper.

Shamelessly borrowing a title from a paper by Genevieve Bell and Paul Dourish, my presentation entitled “Yesterday’s tomorrows” was concerned with the manner in which Ubiquitous Computing has been envisioned. I largely focussed upon the example of HP Labs’ ‘CoolTown’ agenda/project. This largely stemmed from some of the fascinating conversations I had with various engineers, researchers and scientists during recent fieldwork in and around Silicon Valley.

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Promises of ubicomp

Thursday, September 4th, 2008

My research seems to orbit around the future orientation of ubicomp research and development and in that wavering trajectory I encounter various modes of anticipation. In presenting a semblance of certainty (where there need not be, and perhaps is not), obligations may be construed, and promises apparently made. Promises can be thought of as a ‘giving of ground’ to a potential future, an opening of self to a responsibility, perhaps as Nietzsche suggests, to vouch for oneself as a future. Considerations of promises can be suggested as a reading of our anticipatory knowledges that retains an intention, and perhaps responsibility, for particular futures but, against a prescriptive ‘going forward‘ or technological determinism, includes an inherent potential of uncertainty.

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Finding a thesis title

Saturday, March 22nd, 2008

Half-way through my three years of PhD research project I am still mentally searching for, and experimenting with, titles. Thus far I have had the following titles in chronological order:

  • Practising Tomorrows’ Today - Examining the anticipatory logics and techniques of urban-ubiquitous computing development
  • Practising the technics of disappearance: emergent spatialities and the experimental development of ubiquitous computing
  • Mobilising the Socio-technical: The cultural politics of mobile communications technologies
  • Socio-technical spatial formations: Living with the cyber-hybrid
  • Cybrid Spaces

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Bay area fieldwork

Thursday, March 20th, 2008

Golden Gate Bridge

In the first week of March I travelled to the San Francisco Bay area. The purpose of my visit was to meet with key people relevant to my research. (more…)

The promise and problematic of Technology: (Re)thinking bodies, spaces and times

Friday, December 21st, 2007

For the RGS-IBG annual conference 2008 my colleague James Ash and I are proposing a session on understandings of technology in geography. We welcome expressions of interests. I include the abstract for the session below.

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Anticipating futures, engineering expectations

Wednesday, November 21st, 2007

International Science Grid This Week, an online news source for those interested in grid computing and grid-powered science, recently asked me to write an opinion piece about ubiquitous computing, which is featured in this week’s edition. I’d like to thank Cristy Burne at ISGTW for their interest in my research.

Embracing entanglements

Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007

I am in the process of revising a paper that is in the process of review for publication entitled Embracing entanglements: Problematising the cosmopolitics of mobile communications technologies. I include below the abstract. If you are interested in this research feel free to contact me to discuss it more.

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